This one I’ve seen before, a very long time ago. It presents itself as a standard 80’s slasher, but of course there’s a twist to it all. There’s not really very much graphic violence at all for an 80’s slasher, but it does have a decent, familiar 80’s cast and is paced pretty well. Still holds up decently, though it’s not what I’d call a great film.

I don’t know why I even tried this. It’s very rare for a killer animal movie to actually be worthwhile. I guess the fact that it takes place in Chicago swayed me. Anyway, it’s not very good. Not enough actual alligator action. Mostly just the main characters standing around talking about the alligator, and “why won’t anyone believe me about the giant alligator”, and blah blah blah. Time wasting snoozefest.

Why did I try to watch the second one too then? Well, sometimes horror sequels are better than the originals, like with Food of the Gods 2. This isn’t one of those movies though. This was even worse than the first one. Again, just a lot of talking about the alligator and no one believing the existence of the alligator, and with even less alligator appearances this time. Honestly, you could cut the alligator right out of this movie and it wouldn’t even make much difference. It felt like some bad tv drama that someone just decided to toss an alligator into after the fact. I don’t understand why people try to make movies like this if they have no intention of even trying to make it about what they’re presenting it as. “Hey, let’s make a movie about a killer alligator, but then barely have it be about an alligator at all and just put it straight to video! We’ll be rich!”. Awful.

Needed to go back to watching all those Argento movies to wash the bad alligator taste from my mouth. This is another giallo one. This time it’s about a guy who writes slasher novels, who apparently picks up a crazy fan that starts stalking him and reproducing scenes from his book. Naturally, it all takes some crazy twists and turns along the way. I think that’s one of the things I like most about these kinds of movies so far, that they’re so unpredictable. They’re not always entirely unguessable, but they go to great lengths to subtly make you suspect all the wrong people, and the truth ends up being so crazy and convoluted that even if you guess the right person, you still probably won’t guess their motivation. This one does a good job of that too. Very strange stuff with some great surprises.

Ok. Let’s see how many of the NINE Children of the Corn movies I can get through! Man, this movie does not hold up well at all. Interesting concept, but it’s pretty terribly executed. This couple gets lost and ends up in this strange country town where everyone seems to be missing, except for the children, who are acting rather strange. This seems like it could have made for some great tension, except they showed the children killing all the adults in the very first scene, so even though the main characters don’t know what’s going on, the mystery was already spoiled for the audience immediately and so there’s no suspense at all while they slowly plod along, building up to answers that were already given in the beginning.

The effects are so much worse than I remember them being too. I don’t think I’ve seen this since I was a kid and I seem to remember certain parts being much more sinister than they actually were. All I learned from this is that this song totally ripped off the Children of the Corn theme.

Argh. It only gets worse! This is so shitty and boring! How can there be NINE of these movies?!? Who watches all these? Fuck this, I give up already.

Had the strangest urge to see this again. Don’t think I’ve seen it since it came out. As much hate as this movie seems to get, I think it’s actually surprisingly enjoyable still. It’s a very strange movie that doesn’t seem to know who its audience is. It very much resembles a 90’s cartoon and almost seems like it’s aimed at children, except it was R-rated for being packed full of swearing and relatively graphic violence. It was too graphic for kids and too stupid for adults, and so it ended up a failure. Looking back at it now though, it’s really quite amusing. It’s just so very ridiculous and 90’s-feeling, in the very best of ways. It kind of resembles If Looks Could Kill, with a lot of cartoonish spy-movie villain characters and a nonsensical world domination plot. Everything about this movie is just completely ridiculous and insane, and it shouldn’t work at all as a movie. I have no idea how they even got everyone to agree to this thing, but it’s an oddly compelling and laugh-inducing train wreck to watch.

Not to be confused with the video game based Uwe Boll shitfest of the 2000’s, this Alone in the Dark is about some escaped mental patients terrorizing one of their doctors and his family during a blackout. Despite a surprisingly good cast, it’s ultimately just another padded out snoozefest that’s almost all buildup and little to no payoff. At least this one wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t sit through it all, but it wasn’t good enough that I’d ever bother doing so again.

Bell From Hell is some kind of bizarre thriller/”horror” from Spain in the early 70’s. I’m told that it’s about a man who was falsely placed in an insane asylum so his aunt and her three daughters could steal the family inheritance. He then gets out and plans some elaborate revenge that involves learning how to butcher cows and being some kind of home-taught gore-effects artist, I guess. I don’t know. It’s hard to actually discern this from the movie itself. Most of the time nothing really happened. He talked with his relatives a lot and there were some vague threats tossed around on both sides, and not much else.

Then there was this confusing part in the middle where some unrelated young girl runs into a group of hunters in the woods who start antagonizing her and are apparently about to gang-rape her, but then the main character comes out of nowhere on a motorcycle and rescues her, getting wounded in the process. The next scene is him walking into some fancy club with both his arms in giant casts with some elaborate metal braces holding them both up. We then see that the ringleader of the rapey hunters is in there. Main guy sends someone over to rapehunter to tell him to meet him in the bathroom. They meet in the bathroom and rapehunter is like “oh, we were just joking around, you don’t need to tell anyone about what happened, right?”, and so main guy is like “sure! but help me out here, I need to take a piss”. So rapehunter holds his dick while he pisses, then main guy takes off his fake casts and laughs. He tells rapehunter something like “I told her you’d do it!”, rapehunter is confused and asks who, main guy says “ask your wife!”. End of scene. None of this ever comes up again. What the fuck? I’m guessing his plan was to blackmail the guy by telling people he touched his dick in the men’s room? But…everyone saw him go in there with casts, and he asked him to do it, and there’s no proof, and none of this really makes any sense, and what does this even have to do with anything?

That pretty much sums up that movie. Next.

Another giallo by Lamberto Bava. Relatively well-produced, with some imaginative and disturbing death scenes. I don’t know if this one was easier to figure out than the others I’ve seen, or I’m just starting to get used to the twisted thinking of these movies, but I was able to guess the killer much earlier than usual this time. Still, it had an interesting story and kept me entertained the whole time. That’s good enough for me.

Haven’t seen this one in a long time. It still holds up pretty well. Christopher Walken plays an evil angel that has a heavy New York accent because Christopher Walken can’t sound any other way, ever. There’s a good cast overall, and they do a good job of maintaining the momentum of the film considering how blatantly low the budget was for a story of this scope. It’s the most exciting war in heaven, that actually only takes place in abandoned buildings and a hut in the desert, that you’ll ever see.

Also watched The Prophecy 2 and 3, the straight-to-video sequels that still somehow managed to get Walken to sign on even though almost no one else involved would. They’re tolerable for straight-to-video movies, but I wouldn’t recommend that anyone go out of their way to see them like I would the first one (and I’m not even going to talk about the next two sequels).

That’s all for this week. Get used to a steady stream of shitty horror movies over the next year or so, as I continue my quest for lost horror treasures.

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2 comments on “Watchin’ Stuff”

Wow! I hadn’t realized there were NINE Children of the Corn movies. It’s been so long since I’ve seen any of them but I’m pretty sure I ever only watched the first few.
Love all the old horror movie art you include in your posts. I remember liking April Fool’s Day when I was a kid, but I can’t remember much of the movie now. Maybe I’ll have to revisit it some time. 🙂 Nice post!